1. Nigeria Today has an article called 2 Things to Avoid if You Want to Live Longer. They certainly get one thing right - if not a secret to living longer, at least wealthier. That thing is not bothering with most supplements. They cite us as warning that it's the wild, wild west in supplement land - ironically, the kind of thing supplement buyers actually believe about science. As they note, we caution what the FDA cautions about the health fifth columnists they're not allowed to put out of business: “Firms are responsible for evaluating the safety and labeling of their products before marketing to ensure that they meet all the requirements of DSHEA and FDA regulations.”
That means beware supplements that actually do something. It means they have a real drug in them that isn't labeled, and that isn't safe.
2. We're still talking about GMOs?
The demographic that is against agricultural science doesn't like to self-identify as anti-science (they overwhelmingly lament global warming) so they invent anti-science analogs as substitutes: Products haven't been tested enough, scientists have been paid off, corporations shouldn't control our food supply.
By now, GMOs have been tested for 20 years, so that first argument is silly. On the second, Exxon has 10X the revenue of Monsanto, so how is it climate scientists haven't been bought off but biologists are allegedly so easy? And finally, controlling food. There are good reasons to control GMOs, the same way you don't dump a whole bottle of food in your fish tank - but GMOs are off-patent, so it's hard to claim a corporation controls them all.
There is one product that is not controlled by scientists: Golden Rice. But because it has no financial backing it has been trivial for environmental groups and their army of lawyers to block it's approval.
As Valley Advocate notes in their article, "The FDA, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and the American Council on Science and Health are among the groups issuing statements that say as much. But a 2015 Pew Research survey found that 63 percent of the general public believes that foods made with genetically modified organisms are unhealthy to eat."
So it remains a mystery why the public is still being duped by anti-science activists when scientists say there's no drama.
3. In the New York Post, they note my call to put an end to prediabetes hysteria in the Chicago Tribune. The premiums for the Affordable Care Act are going up 18-23 percent and the CDC is scaremongering up to 86 million people into thinking they are going to get Type 2 diabetes based on one average - an average that is only clinically relevant for 5 percent of people. That's why the UK's NHS and the World Health Organisation refuse to consider pre-diabetes a thing; and so should we.
4. California's vaccination law has taken effect, but is obviously under legal challenge - the type of people who are anti-vaccine are invariably Big Government, except when it comes to vaccines, energy and GMOs, when they think wedge politics at the state and local level should make the costs for those things unattainable for poor people.
Using ACSH, Thomas Elias at Record Searchlight sets the matter straight.
In the past, we didn't need a law, people remembered polio - but California is always going to social engineer so they are doing a good thing this time, even if it's in a bad way,
5. In USA Today, ACSH biologists Dr. Alex Berezow and Dr. Julianna LeMieux debunk another International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiology fetish - that hot drinks are going to give you cancer. Obviously if you pour boiling hot water down your throat every day, that is going to cause damage, but no one does that. Yet IARC scaremongers everything from red meat to pesticides to, now, hot beverages, this exact same way: They find something they want to declare a hazard, pick a committee who meet very narrow criteria, and those members pick studies they like and do a meta-analysis.
When IARC committees were composed of mainstream scientists, it was a legitimate group - but now that they ban any scientists who have ever taken industry funding (who will be the best in the field) and allow Environmental Defense Fund consultants, they have lost the confidence of the public.
But the public still has confidence in us, no matter how often frauds like osteopath Joe Mercola, SourceWatch, and other Deniers for Hire try to claim we must be bought off because we accept science, rather than the alternative.
